


hollow

by MathildaHilda



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Torture, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, Peeta's the mockingjay but not really, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25317460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: “She said you love me,” Katniss says, voice cold and clipped. Still hoarse from screaming.He meets her eyes, despite Haymitch telling him not to. He doesn’t try to speak.“They said it too,” she adds, and Peeta wants to scream.
Relationships: Gale Hawthorne & Peeta Mellark, Haymitch Abernathy & Peeta Mellark, Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark, Peeta Mellark & Finnick Odair, Primrose Everdeen & Peeta Mellark
Comments: 1
Kudos: 57





	hollow

Her eyes find his, and for a moment, it feels just like Before.

Before the Games, Before the Quell, Before the Capitol.

Before a lot of things, when most of what they had to do was be polite and smiling.

She meets his eyes, and he starts to smile.

She reaches for him, and her arms tighten around his throat.

~

He’s seen the footage multiple times.

Has seen Katniss and her last stand, the broken bow in her two hands, and her quiver empty of arrows. Has seen the shimmering of Brutus and his blade arching downward, ready to strike her dead.

Has seen Katniss thrust her bow upward to meet his sword – metal on metal – and has heard the clashing and breaking of the former. The blade clips her shoulder, and her mouth opens in a silent scream – deafened by the storm rolling through their wedge of the Arena.

Brutus rolls over her when she trips on the uneven terrain, head-over-heel, and lands neatly and poised and ready to strike.

She’s not supposed to be there. This wasn’t the plan.

Haymitch usually finds him before he can hear Katniss banshee scream or see the broken arrowhead make contact.

Brutus is dead. Katniss is gone.

There’s not really much more to know.

~

Everyone knows he loves her, despite what the Capitol would and can do to her and will make her say. Everyone knows that.

Everyone also knows, despite their best efforts, that she doesn’t love him as much as he loves her.

Finnick calls him a fool; “I think she loved you long before she knew it herself,” he says and ties the rope into another knot.

“I think she still does.”

He doesn’t say anything. “Her acting isn’t the greatest, but I know true feelings when I see them,” Finnick concludes.

He hates that he asks, “why hasn’t he killed her?”

( _the first time he sees her in an interview, dressed to the teeth in smokey gray, her hair draped featherlight over her shoulders and any trace of gold wiped away, he cries,_

_he holds it back for a long time, but eventually a sob escapes,_

_cressida captures everything,_

_coin doesn’t think of love as a good angle in a rebellion of such a scale, but heavensbee disagrees,_

_haymitch shouts, which seems to have become another left behind by the booze Thirteen lacks,_

_peeta’s tears seem to mark the rest of the war_ ,)

Finnick is quiet. The rope lies unknotted in his hand.

Not even Heavensbee has an answer, and he seems to have an answer to everything. Coin just fumes, but she’s done that since they picked him out of the Arena.

She’s been angry for a long time, but so has he.

~

He looks at her from across the room.

She stares back. Katniss had always been a little hard to read when she closed herself off. Maybe an emotion or two, but not nearly enough to make her understandable.

Now, she looks furious.

He keeps his hands loose by his side, but his shoulders rise involuntarily, as if though that could shield the neckbrace and the bruises hiding underneath it. He breathes unevenly, and her anger seems to grow with every breath he takes.

His eyes are red, and hers are terrifying.

“She said you love me,” Katniss says, voice cold and clipped. Still hoarse from screaming.

He meets her eyes, despite Haymitch telling him not to. He doesn’t try to speak.

“They said it too,” she adds, and Peeta wants to scream.

( _they dressed her in smoke to quench a rebellion_ ,)

~

Gale hands him a gun while his throat is still bruised, and tells him to shoot.

He does and misses. The next magazine hits the outer rim of the target. The one after that hits the target’s chest.

Gale tells him to keep training. Katniss screams inside his head. Finnick ties another knot.

Peeta empties another magazine into Snow’s chest.

~

“I told her about you again.” Prim slumps in her seat, folding herself against the table, using her hands to steady her chin. She looks him square in the face, eyes somehow void of anything too telling.

He decides to humor her; “yeah?”

“Yeah.” She nods, her pale braid bobbing against her shoulder. “I told her about the bread.”

He stabs his food a little too hard. Imagines that it’s Snow’s face.

“She said she remembered that. Raisin and-,”

“Raisin and nut.” He finishes for her. Their smiles aren’t bright.

The loaf warms his fingers as he passes through the door.

“Got you something,” he says, placing it on the table next to her bed. Her eyes are a storm; gray and black and blue.

He backs up against the wall, close to the door. She searches his face for something, then lets her eyes travel to his throat.

“You’re okay?”

It’s a question, he realizes almost a minute too late, and he starts to nod before he remembers that he shouldn’t; “yeah, I’m okay.”

Katniss pauses. “I’m glad.”

There’s another pause. Haymitch would be facepalming if he wasn’t as worried as Peeta knows he is.

“Are _you_ okay?” He asks, and she tears her gaze from his throat. She blinks as if the question confuses her.

“Yeah. I’m okay, too,” she says and lifts a hand. A greeting, Peeta thinks later, but right now, all he can focus on his just how crooked her fingers are.

He swallows the bile in his throat. “Good,” he says, and smiles.

He taps his hand against the door. She clenches her jaw. “Is this whole thing for me?” She asks. They’re seventeen, but in that moment, she sounds seven.

He takes a shaky breath. “Yeah. All of it, as much of it as you want.”

The keys jingle in the door behind him, but he doesn’t move. Katniss reaches across the bed and takes the bread in her hand, turning it in her hands.

“You didn’t burn it,” she says, and he can almost hear the smile. He smiles back.

She unfolds the cloth slowly, letting the crumbs collect in her lap. When the loaf rolls out and lands on the bed, she picks it up and tears it in half. She sticks her nose in one of the halves and reaches across the bed again; toward him.

“It’s yours,” he says, robotically. “I know. And, now it’s yours too,” she replies. He takes the half in his hand.

Their fingers don’t touch, but it somehow feels like holding her hand again.

~

He watches from afar, his gun slung over his back and a canister of water in his hand, as they hand her a bow.

Her hand shakes, and her fingers won’t curl, but she holds it as if it’s something sacred. Ebony black, sleek, and easy. She can’t fire it, not right now, but she can hold onto it for the moment.

Because, for a moment, she’s a girl from the Seam. For a moment, she’s unreachable.

For a moment, she holds her father’s hand in her own broken one.

Mockingjays shouldn’t be caged, but snow has crippled her, and her song breaks apart in her hands.

~

Haymitch laughs when Heavensbee slides the photoshopped propos across the table.

Peeta frowns for a minute, before Beetee, of all people, is the one to break the silence left behind by Haymitch; “this can’t be serious,” he says.

Heavensbee looks at him with even brows. “This is a rebellion, Beetee, so yes, it is serious,” he replies. Beetee looks far from impressed.

“Yes, but _this_ is _not_ serious,” Haymitch says and slides his propo photo back across the table. It collides with Plutarch’s closed fist.

“You want love as your angle? Give the kid something else, something that makes him look brave.” He waves a hand over Peeta. “Not like that.” He points back to the photo.

It’s Peeta, awkwardly stood facing the camera, jaw locked, and looking for all the world like the most serious person in the world. It’s an older photo, taken from the meager group of photos taken of the Tributes from the 75th Game, and, to quote Katniss, he didn’t look very impressed with the world.

Maybe he looks impress _ive_ , but he sure doesn’t look _impressed_.

And, maybe that was his unconscious point if the photoshop hadn’t ruined it.

“It makes him look brave.” Coin picks up one of the photos. Peeta lowers his own.

“It makes him look _scared_ ,” Haymitch says. Peeta looks again. “And, people don’t _want_ _scared_.”

Tears of deep gold frame his face, like clawmarks from any odd angle, carving into his cheeks and jaw. Peeta bites his tongue.

Katniss screams inside his head.

~

Peeta stumbles around Twelve, and Cressida cuts most of it out.

He doesn’t cry when he lowers himself into the dust of the bakery or the collapsed floor of his parents’ bedroom. There’s nothing left but rubble and bent metal.

There aren’t even any photos left, but he wonders, idly, if he would’ve brought them with him if there had been any.

He walks them through what would’ve been a day in a bakery, Before the Games, and tells them which cakes were the easiest to decorate and which ones tasted the best.

He tells them everything he’s willing to lay bare, and then some.

It doesn’t make him feel brave, he thinks when Pollux lowers the camera. It makes him feel like a kid.

And, maybe that’s the whole point.

The _new_ _point_.

The new point being that what the rebellion will leave behind – successful or not – is children.

Children and rubble.

~

Katniss catches him around the neck with her bow and yanks him backward.

Boggs goes to knock her out, but she suddenly topples backward over the steps, dragging Peeta down with her. They tumble, every roll harder than the last, and she yanks harder every time she ends up beneath him.

He kicks her legs, and when it proves futile, he curls up into himself and tries to press away from her rather than toward her. When he finally ends up sideways, midroll, he scrambles away.

Maybe it looks pitiful, but he’s far from full strength, and Katniss is way stronger than she looks – rolling or not. He heaves breath after breath as he scrambles away, one hand flying automatically toward his throat.

He still has his handgun. He unholsters it, and in a split second, Katniss has an arrow nocked, and the string pulled taut.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, wheezing in his freshly bruised throat. Katniss swallows hard and blinks twice – almost as if she’s seen this exact situation, just a different outcome.

He separates the mag from the gun, and throws them in either direction, despite Boggs yelling at him from up above and Gale yelling at him in his ear, and holds his hand just the same way she’d done when he’d given her the bread.

Palms up, fingers poised. Greeting.

She pulls the bowstring further.

“I’d never hurt you,” he says, and Katniss snarls through gritted teeth.

~

He knows how to use a gun, and he’s good at it. Not as good as Gale, and far from as efficient with blades as pretty much anyone else he’s met – both in the Arenas and outside of them – but good enough.

He’s good enough with weapons, but both Heavensbee and Cressida agree that guns look too dramatic and brutal in a propo (‘ _it’s not as if the Capitol use them_ ,’ _Haymitch throws in their face one afternoon_ ,), so Gale hands him a shortsword and a handgun (‘ _for emergencies,’ he tells him when he gives him the gun, because apparently, they trust him around the big guns, but not the small ones_ ,).

“Rebellions aren’t won by mercies,” Coin says. Peeta watches Katniss out of the corner of his eye, trying to pick apart one of Finnick’s tougher knots in an attempt to gain some of the dexterity back in her fingers.

She’s not listening, and neither is he.

Finnick ties another, elaborate knot. Annie leans her head on his shoulder.

“Maybe this one should be,” he says to Haymitch later, while Effie does her best not to coo and cry over Katniss at the same time.

Haymitch doesn’t say anything, but Peeta’s guessing that what goes through Haymitch’s head isn’t the same thing going through his own.

Life has never shown a single one of them a single mercy, so why not try and fix something with a mercy of their own?

Then they bomb the hospital in Eight, and Peeta just about loses it.

~

Despite the pain, he curls in on himself.

Despite the memories, he closes his eyes and pretends to sleep whenever Haymitch or Effie or Prim enter the room.

Despite the raging flames and the sweet smell of burning flesh, he eats the food prepared for him. He throws it up later and coughs on the bile.

Despite himself still being alive, he leaves his blade in its sheath.

Mrs. Everdeen sits in a chair and reads a book, sometimes aloud, and he stares out the window and wishes he could fly. He doesn’t want to fall.

Just fly.

He’s not the Mockingjay.

His sword, black with soot and blood, saw to that.

Gale burns in his memories, and Finnick begs in his dreams.

( _death doesn’t care,_

 _peeta thinks that it should_ ,)

~

When he wakes up in the belly of a ship meant for the unknown, he thinks he’s finally found some resemblance to peace.

It’s quiet, after all, save from the murmuring of the hovercraft.

He almost closes his eyes again, when a small hand lands on his arm, warm against his cool skin.

There’s grief in Prim’s eyes.

He sees only guilt in Haymitch’s eyes when he growls his understanding on the matter of Katniss. Heavensbee has the audacity to almost look smug.

Gale broods in a corner, a hand to his forehead, and Finnick has enough smarts to look unnerved by Peeta’s sudden outburst.

“You promised,” he says, hands balled into fists by his side. “You _promised_ ,” he damn near shouts, and Haymitch bites his tongue.

( _he’s too soft-spoken, someone had commented after their victory,_

_too quiet, too calculating,_

_so, he doesn’t say anything else before he clocks haymitch across the face,_ )

~

Katniss stares at him from the shadows of Tigris’s basement, gray eyes almost silver in the light.

He meets hers with little hesitation, despite the horizontal bruise across his throat ( _yet again_ ,).

“Do you love me?” She asks in a whisper, and he sees Gale shift in his corner of the room. Peeta swallows. It almost hurts.

“Yes,” he says.

“Real? Or not?”

“Real.” ( _all too real_ ,) He says, and she shifts her eyes to the bow still in her hands. Her fingers curl around the bowstring.

“I don’t think I can kill him,” she says, and Gale looks up and holds his own bow the way she does.

“You won’t have to,” Peeta reassures. She looks at him again.

“But I want to.”

Peeta can only nod.

( _the fires burn rapid in the capitol,_

_snow leaves roses and dead mockingjays in the streets,_

_gale is gone, and finnick is too,_ )

~

“You’ve seen this war, Mr. Mellark, and what it can do,” Snow says and holds a rose in his hand.

Peeta bites his cheek. Snow chuckles.

Peeta tries not to shift too much, but the explosion busted his prosthetic, and it chafes uncomfortably against his stump. It smells too much like poison in the garden.

“But, what it will do, _well_ , that’s up for anyone to guess.”

“Decide, you mean,” Peeta says, and Snow plucks a petal from the rose. It falls, red as blood, onto the grass between them.

“Decisions are sometimes made on guesses.”

“Sometimes, but not always.”

Snow lowers the flower.

“You’re governing has told me as much. That, and your rules.”

“My rules? Dear boy, the rules of the Games were simply-,”

“-the Games were simply guesses made on assumptions that they could lead to a decision of life rather than death,” Peeta snaps, and Snow looks all the more curious.

“I’m thinking you used that tactic, too,” he continues.

There’s a dribble of blood snaking its way across Snow’s lower lip.

The bees buzz around the flowers, and they sound too much like tracker jackers.

( _katniss wears a yellow jacket, arms tight around his throat,_

_flames envelop children, gale, finnick, trees, roses, dogs and cats and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends,_

_~~a mockingjay burns,~~ _

_embers envelop the world, rubble, corpses, flowers in black and white and gray and blue,_

_it smells; sweet, poisonous, acid,_

_it ruins-,_ )

“Mr. Mellark, are you quite alright?” Snow asks with a smile that knows without even having to ask.

 _‘it ruins,’_ he almost says.

Instead, he says nothing, and Snow laughs again, with red-on-white teeth.

~

Willow runs across a meadow of corpses, but all she sees is the flowers growing there.

Rye runs across a market place, not knowing how the cobblestones are filled with blood, scrubbed clean by fire.

Katniss sings desperate songs by the fireplace, carding desperate fingers through her daughter’s hair when the nights are long and the days are dark. She sings happy songs and braids her hair, and she doesn’t ask about her mother’s scarred fingers just yet. She doesn’t ask about the songs.

He burns the bread too often when he forgets life and think of fire, and Rye pokes him in the side and hands him the tongs. He takes them with shallow breaths, and Rye doesn’t ask about those just yet. He only knows that his father doesn’t burn one type of bread, so he teaches himself to like it, despite raisin tasting funny and nuts sometimes being tough to chew.

The children don’t ask yet. They will.

But, for now, they run on meadows built on corpses and cobblestones scrubbed clean of blood, and plants flowers ( _no roses_ ) in the garden.

Rye sings to the mockingjays. Willow runs through the trees and the fields.

They won’t ask just yet.


End file.
